Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  DeMott's review (enticingly titled “A Grand Gatherum of Some Late 20th-Century American Weirdos”) faulted Cheever for everything from his “sad, licked lyricism” to his “carelessness, lax compositions, perfunctoriness” to the “broken-backed” structure of his novel:

  And finally—most important maybe—there's the problem of story style vs. novel style. Except when tricked up in gothicism, fantasy or allegory, the novel is a world of explanations, and the story is a world of phenomena. … [Cheever's stories] say that nowadays a man falls in love with his baby sitter and heals himself by buying a lathe … and by the time the reader of any of them thinks to ask, What? What was that? Why? he's into the next tale in the book. No explanations offered or required.

  With novels, DeMott suggested, authors are obliged to provide some explicit rationale for their characters’ behavior, and this was conspicuously absent in Bullet Park. But then, one might just as well make a similar observation about DeMott's review—that is, before the good reader can ask, What? But isn't the present novel exempt from such “explanations” precisely because it's intended as “gothicism, fantasy or allegory”?—DeMott has already clinched his argument, as far as it goes: “John Cheever's short stories are and will remain lovely birds—dense in inexplicables and beautifully trim. But in the gluey atmosphere of ‘Bullet Park’ no birds sing.” And so it went for other reviewers who judged the novel in naturalistic terms: The plot “is not at all convincing,” said Charles Nicol in The Atlantic Monthly; Hammer “is no more interesting than any other lunatic,” said Guy Davenport in the National Review (Davenport also echoed a number of his colleagues in describing the novel's ending as “false and shockingly inept”).

  Granted, Bullet Park is a strange performance, and it was a bad sign that even reviewers who were nothing but well disposed to Cheever seemed a little puzzled. A few months before her review appeared in the Washington Post Book World, Joyce Carol Oates had been quoted as saying that she was Updike's and Cheever's “ideal reader” (“whatever they write I read immediately, and I read it again two or three times”), so it made sense perhaps that she and Updike were en rapport in regard to Bullet Park: neither thought the book amounted to a novel, properly speaking, but rather that it worked (as Updike wrote in the London Times) “as a slowly revolving mobile of marvellously poeticized moments,” or, as Oates put it, “a series of eerie, sometimes beautiful, sometimes overwrought vignettes.” Oates knew better than to worry whether the plot was “convincing” or not, pointing out that Cheever was if anything bent on making his plot as outlandish as possible; and yet, for all the novel's seeming absurdity, said Oates, it conveyed a sense of “terror … as deadly, more deadly, than any promised in the glib new genre of ‘black comedy’ Cheever has been writing such comedy for decades.” John Leonard, whose review appeared in the daily New York Times, also realized that conventional narrative was beside the point, and praised the novel as Cheever's “deepest, most challenging book.” And finally a synthesis of sorts was found in Anatole Broyard's New Republic review, which suggested that the book was a little too fraught with oddities, that Cheever had apparently gotten carried away by his own virtuosity: “He is determined to be surprising or original, even at the cost of incredulity.”

  Such a range of opinion (and general puzzlement) indicated obtuseness on the part of certain reviewers, but also the possibility that Cheever's own intentions were so intuitive, and subtle, that in some respects they were obscure even to himself. In the novel's formative stages, he'd noted: “I count on my experience with Fred [his brother] and the division in my own spirit but I haven't made much progress.” He seems to have begun, then, with his old obsession over the duality of human nature and his own nature in particular: dark and light, flesh and spirit, grossness and aspiration. However, when readers later interpreted Bullet Park along these lines—suggesting, for instance, that Hammer and Nailles were opposite sides of the same person—Cheever balked: “Neither Hammer nor Nailles were meant to be either psychiatric or social metaphors; they were meant to be two men with their own risks. I think the book was misunderstood on those terms.” It bears repeating that Cheever had a horror of simplistic allegory, and would naturally prefer to regard his own creations as somewhat rounded, distinct personages—but obviously Hammer and Nailles also serve a metaphorical purpose, underlined by their almost flippantly suggestive nomenclature: “Lying in bed that night Nailles thought: Hammer and Nailles, spaghetti and meatballs, salt and pepper …” And lest we miss the point, the narrator also observes that their doubleness extends to a rather exact physical resemblance: “They were about the same weight, height and age, and they both wore a size-eight shoe.”

  Whether or not the two characters were originally conceived as complementary opposites—that is, as an easy metaphor for a divided personality—Cheever ultimately developed the idea into something more complex (and even, at times, opaque). Some critics have made the point that Hammer and Nailles are actually quite similar, and the novelist John Gardner suggested that the main difference is merely a matter of luck: “Nailles's blessing is that he is married to a good woman and has a son, whereas Hammer is married to a bitch and is childless.” But while it's true that Nailles's marriage is happier than Hammer's, one should bear in mind that Mrs. Nailles's devotion to her husband is something of an imposture: on at least three occasions, she has nearly succumbed to extramarital temptation, only to be saved each time by some happy accident (“a fire, a runny nose and some spoiled sturgeon eggs”); accidental or not, though, she regards “her virtue as a jewel—an emblem—of character, discipline and intelligence.” So it goes, then, to some extent, with Hammer and Nailles: it's not that one is good and the other evil, but that Nailles's failings are bridled by a rather naïve reverence for social convention, and also perhaps (as Gardner would have it) by his relative happiness and luck; in actual fact, though, his failings differ from Hammer's mostly in terms of degree. For example, both Hammer and Nailles are homophobic, for the common reason that they fear homosexuality in themselves. “I wish it didn't exist,” Nailles admits to his son, explaining that the only reason he joined the Chemists Club was so he could have a place to “pump ship” in midtown other than the Grand Central toilets, where he feared “getting into a moral crisis” every time he was accosted by a homosexual. For his part, Hammer escapes the attention of a “faggot” on the beach by helping a family fly their kite—an act of conspicuous wholesomeness—though afterward he's enraged by the unnerving potentialities of his own nature: “The faggot had vanished but I longed then for a moral creation whose mandates were heftier than the delight of children, the trusting smiles of strangers and a length of kite string.” Likewise, too, Hammer and Nailles are both in their fashion prone to depression, alcoholism, and murderous tendencies. Nailles's weaknesses, however, are mostly under control, whereas Hammer's incipient criminality is revealed by his long first-person rant in Part Two; afterward, when the narrative reverts to the third person, the reader sees—from outside—how strenuously Hammer works to impersonate a relatively “normal” person such as Nailles: “[Hammer] had a nervous way of shifting his head, setting his teeth and bracing his shoulders as if his thinking consisted of a series of resolves and decisions. I must cut down on my smoking. (Teeth-setting.) Life can be beautiful. (Shoulder-bracing.) I am often misunderstood. (A sudden lifting of the head.) Nailles’ manner was much more serene.” Nailles may be more “serene,” but when Hammer reveals his inner self with a casual suggestion that Nailles shoot his beloved old dog, the latter is so infuriated that “for a moment he might have killed Hammer.”

  Like his wife, Nailles prefers to believe in his own happiness and virtue, just as he takes for granted the happiness and virtue of his neighbors in Bullet Park—a typical Cheeverian suburb where decorum prevails at all costs, while misery and corruption and even human mortality are denied whenever possible. “I think [Bullet Park] stinks,” says Hammer's wife, Marietta, at an otherwise genteel gathering.
“It's just like a masquerade party. All you have to do is to get your clothes at Brooks, catch the train and show up in church once a week and no one will ever ask a question about your identity.” When she then proceeds to castigate her cipherlike (but actually homicidal) husband as a “doormat,” the other guests politely make their excuses to leave rather than endure this unsavory spectacle of marital unhappiness. Thus Mrs. Hammer serves much the same purpose as Gee-Gee in “The Scarlet Moving Van,” whose drunken tirades are meant to instruct his neighbors (“They've got to learn. … I've got to teach them”) in the inevitability of “anger and lust and the agonies of death.” As for Nailles, he is a kind of ideal candidate for such edification. “Well I suppose there's plenty to be sad about if you look around,” he remarks to his son, “but it makes me sore to have people always chopping at the suburbs. … The living is cheaper out here and I'd be lost if I couldn't get some exercise. People seem to make some connection between respectability and moral purity that I don't get.” What Nailles doesn't “get,” of course, is that the vaunted “respectability” of a utopia such as Bullet Park is a sham: his charming neighbors the Wickwires are drinking themselves into early decrepitude, while Mr. Heathcup tries assuaging his misery by painting his house until he finally gives up and kills himself. For Nailles, however—a soi-disant “chemist” whose real job is merchandising Spang, a mouthwash, thereby devoting himself to the denial of such everyday unpleasantness as bad breath—all infirmity belongs to some abstract “principality” far away from Bullet Park, and it bemuses him to receive occasional reminders of such a place in the form of a postcard, say: “Edna is under sedation most of the time and has about three weeks to live but she would like a letter from you.” No wonder that when he first observes Hammer (at church), he decides that his would-be destroyer is a man of “invincible” excellence—because, after all, he appears to be. “I go on about the vulnerability of Nailles,” Cheever reflected in his notes, “of a man who was so absolutely of his time and the conveniences of his society that he was utterly defenseless at the appearance of an alien set of values.”

  Nailles's best quality is also the source of his vulnerability—namely, his extravagant love of family, “[which was] like some limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that would surround them, cover them, preserve them and leave them insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic.” His ability to demonstrate this love, however, is constrained by the narrow propriety of life as a Bullet Park paterfamilias. When, for instance, he finds some dirty pictures concealed in his son's dictionary, he quietly disposes of them and just as quietly informs the boy, without censure, that he has done so. Trusting as ever in appearances, he simply assumes that Tony accepts his decision as being for his own good; if, however, Nailles were to turn on Tony's tape recorder—one of the many generous gifts he delights in giving his son—he'd discover that all was not so well in their relationship: “You dirty old baboon,” the young man intones on the tape, “you dirty old baboon …” Indeed, Nailles is so shocked when his son finally reveals his true feelings—his disdain for a father who wastes his life “pushing mouthwash”—that he responds by trying to “split [Tony's] skull” with a golf putter, and so precipitates the melancholy that leaves his son languishing in bed.

  Part One of the novel—concerning Nailles and the world of Bullet Park—though a bit on the desultory side, nonetheless has a kind of poetic coherence. In the first chapter we are shown around the suburb with the mysterious Hammer and his real-estate agent, while a suave omniscient narrator remarks on the lives of various characters encountered along the way. As Updike and Oates pointed out, the plot unfolds in a series of vignettes—”moments”—related by a sort of nuanced repetition. The charming Wickwires, for example, are presented as representative citizens who constantly hurt themselves with a lot of drunken accidents—then, after an exquisite four-page set piece, they vanish without a trace for more than two hundred pages; finally, as the novel is ending (and only the careful reader will remember the Wickwires at all, much less their drunken tendency to hurt themselves), they reappear, charming as ever: he with court plaster over one eye and she in a wheelchair. “I don't work with plots,” Cheever remarked in his Paris Review interview (and throughout his career in so many words). “I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts. … Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap.” Fair enough. On the other hand, one can see DeMott's point about the “broken-backed” structure of the novel: Part Two—Hammer's monologue—seems a mystifying digression from all that has gone before. Nailles, the erstwhile protagonist, disappears Wickwire-like for some seventy pages, and the tone of the book is entirely different—indeed, we seem to have stumbled into an altogether different novel, or rather a string of diffuse non sequiturs. A letter from Hammer's mother rambles on for several pages, serving no discernible purpose except to establish that she is barking mad, which might have been established with a sentence or two—with, say, her assertion that she can divine the sort of person who has preceded her in certain hotel beds: “It is a simple fact that we impress something of ourselves—our spirits and desires—on the mattresses where we lie and I have more than ample evidence to prove my point.” Much attention is also lavished on Hammer's oddball father, a muscle-bound drunk who models his physique for caryatids holding up parts of various Munich hotels; when at last Hammer finds the man—passed out, naked, and wearing a necklace of champagne corks (as Cheever claims to have found his own father)—nothing comes of it. Hammer leaves. “What I wanted was verisimilitude and improbability,” Cheever explained to Litvinov, who confessed bewilderment over these episodes. “[Hammer's mother's] letters—and Taylor holding up all those buildings—are meant to seem true and false. It seems to me that conventional narrative is untruthful these days and that one has to divine an inner narrative. Oh ho.” “Oh ho” is a phrase to which Cheever often reverted; usually it implied a kind of risible doubt over the merit of his own pronouncements.

  One might argue that Hammer's story is bizarre and incoherent because Hammer himself is mad, and so he proceeds according to the dreamlike logic of madness. His primary quest, after all, is to find “a room with yellow walls” and thereby cure his cafard, because he finds such an ambience uniquely cheerful. He is so determined that when he finally discovers the yellow-roomed house of one Dora Emmison, he proceeds to ply her with drink and thus cause her to die in an automobile accident—whereupon he buys the house and is happy for a while. Then his wife, Marietta, repaints the house pink and his cafard returns. At this point, the reader is perhaps too dumbfounded to wonder why the man doesn't simply buy a can of yellow paint. John Leonard, in his generous critique of the novel, suggested that Hammer “isn't intended to be believable” because he is “an aspect or fantasy of Nailles's mind … an Other fashioned from anarchic depths, a creature of repressed libidinal ferocity.” It may be so; one pictures Cheever nodding his head and wondering if that's what he meant after all. Indeed, it would explain just about everything, if not for the consummate banality of Nailles's mind: how could such a man begin to imagine a quest for yellow walls, a father who models for caryatids, the whole fantastic rigmarole?

  As for Hammer's motive in attempting to murder Tony Nailles—it seems wholly random, contradictory, and yes, perfunctory. At first Hammer appears to be motivated by his mother's manifesto condemning the “spiritual poverty” of American life; exiled in Kitzbühel, the woman explains why she refrains from returning to her homeland: “ ‘I would settle in some place like Bullet Park. I would buy a house. I would be very inconspicuous. … I would single out as an example some young man, preferably an advertising executive … a good example of a life lived without any genuine emotion or value. … I would crucify him on the door of Christ's Church,’ she said passionately. ‘Nothing less than a crucifixion will wake the world.’ “ When Hammer hears this, he sensibly concludes that his mother is “a crazy old woman;” but later, for whatever reason (because of his rage over the “faggot” on
the beach?), he decides his mother's plan is “sound” and proceeds to carry it out to a nicety, hoping eventually to murder Nailles, whose photograph he accidentally finds in a dental journal. Why Nailles? Because he's the very sort of vapid ad-man his mother had specified? Because of his idiotic commercials for Spang? Not at all: “It was infantile to rail at this sort of thing, Hammer thought. It had been the national fare for twenty-five years and it was not likely to improve. … Hammer had chosen the victim for his excellence.” What excellence? Nailles's happy home life? The author doesn't say, nor does he say why Hammer decides (in a one-sentence afterthought) to murder Tony instead.